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Tattered Splendor Of the Raj

By TUNKU VARADARAJAN

Published: February 28, 1999

LATE last year, an unwelcome headline appeared on the front page of The Hindu, the very staid English-language daily of Madras. ''Crowbar for the Heritage Buildings,'' the newspaper reported. ''One by one, age-old buildings are making way to vulgar commercial constructions . . . Buildings which once occupied the pride of place look a picture of neglect with weeds and shrubs sprouting from their roofs. The resplendence of a great heritage is today only a memory.''

Some weeks before that, over a dinner of spiced lamb chops at the Connemara Hotel, S. Muthiah, the city's foremost historian, lamented the state of British colonial architecture in his beloved city. ''Before the British there was no Madras,'' he told me, sadly. ''It seems that after the British there will be no Madras either.'' He took a small sip of cold beer, and averted his gaze. The story of Madras can be a painful one.

The last episode of this story was a politically inspired change of name. Madras is now known officially as Chennai, believed by local ideologues to be its correct Tamil appellation. The city's residents, however, stick stubbornly to Madras in their ordinary dealings, although businesses have had to spend a fortune on new letterheads.

The city is steeped in powerful romance. Founded on a nondescript sliver of beach on the southeastern coast of India in 1639 by officers of the East India Company, Madras provided the British with their first serious foothold on Indian land. They built Fort St. George, at first little more than a fortified warehouse, but which came to be the bastion from which the company ventured further and further afield. It was here that they made their first grand profits, and here that they recruited their first native armies. It was in the city's Tamil hinterland that Robert Clive first took on the French in a series of battles for India's imperial custody; and Madras was the place where Elihu Yale, one of the city's earliest Governors, made the fortune that endowed the university that bears his name.

The British ran Madras from 1639 to 1947, the year of India's independence, and in few other colonial cities can their imprint have been so strong. ''At independence,'' said Mr. Muthiah, ''Madras was a gracious city, a garden city. It was green, verdant. The place was orderly, the buildings gleaming, the streets uncluttered. Now almost everything is a mess.''

Mr. Muthiah is not an apologist for the Raj. He is merely an old-fashioned man, unwilling to consign a building to the scrap heap merely because its builders were colonizers. The author of ''Madras Discovered'' -- ''an historical guide to looking around the city'' -- he is part of a small band of men and women who research and write about the dwindling heritage of their city. He has also convened the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, a citizens' group that focuses on the architecture of bygone eras, noting violations of zoning laws, taking municipalities to task for their neglect of buildings and challenging the local government in court whenever it seeks to demolish a colonial structure to make room for a high-rise building. Theirs is an uphill struggle, and the longer a visitor postpones a trip to Madras, the greater the chance that another jewel will have fallen victim to the wreckers' ball.

For now, Madras is still a treasure house of British colonial architecture, with the Regency and Indo-Saracenic styles particularly prevalent. The latter, conceived in this city by Paul Benfield more than 200 years ago, is the style by which the British Raj found its truest architectural idiom. The grander buildings of Lutyens's New Delhi, constructed in the first part of this century, have their roots in Madras, and there are some colonial buildings in this southern Indian metropolis that easily match those in the capital for their grandeur and panache.

Two obvious examples are the High Court, and the railway station in the Egmore district. The first, built in 1892, is a red brick leviathan, believed to be the largest judicial building in the world after the Courts of London. As for the station -- with its towers capped with domed pavilions -- there can be few places that provide quite so enchanting a locale from which to catch a train.

But my favorite, Mr. Muthiah's favorite, everyone's favorite, is the Senate House of Madras University. My father received his degree there in 1954 and I saw it for the first time last November. The building is a breathtaking Indo-Saracenic confection, built by Robert Chisholm, master of the genre, in 1873. It is of red brick, and blends Byzantine, Moorish and Rajput Hindu styles.

The windows, illuminated with colored glass, are set behind arches held up by solid pillars. The building is topped with domed finials and square towers, with projecting balconies shaded by angled eaves.

BUT wander inside, and you will encounter an astonishing state of disrepair. The stained glass is mostly broken or smashed. The once-varnished teakwood floor has been ruined by the march of a million careless feet, bird droppings, paint, dirt and bat feces. Wild plants grow, unheeded, inside the House, forcing themselves out through cracks in the wall and ceiling. Bats, beetles, birds, cats, moths and bees have made themselves at home. The university, not surprisingly, no longer uses the place for degree ceremonies: when I was there, the main hall had been rented by a firm exhibiting a meager range of office accessories. When a salesman observed me taking notes, he assumed I was a trade visitor. ''Would you like to know about our Velcro boards?'' he enquired, with the politesse of the Madrassi. I did not have the heart to say no.

The efforts of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage -- which recently saved a magnificent Regency-style Masonic building from the bulldozers, a building that will now house the state police headquarters -- appear to have moved Madras University to act at last to rescue Senate House. The vice chancellor has appointed B. Narasimhaiah -- an archeologist who led an Indian team that restored parts of Angkor Wat -- to oversee the restoration of the Senate House. The cost is expected to be about $1 million. The sum is astronomical by Indian standards, especially for a university.

The Senate House stands a few hundred yards away from the Marina Beach, the stretch of sand that is Madras's favorite open-air playground. Of an evening, the beach is a hive of strolling families, courting couples, scurrying children, vendors and acrobats. As one walks south, away from Senate House, one can see the city's other Indo-Saracenic masterpiece, Chepauk Palace, now taken over by myriad government departments. Completed in 1768 as the palace of Muhammad Ali Wallajah, the Nawab of Arcot, the palace was probably designed by Benfield, who was also the princeling's greatest creditor. The building, which once dominated the city's skyline, is now hidden from view by modern concrete structures, and a visitor must snake past these to reach what was once an architectural gem. Its ornate facade is no longer visible.

Although the former palace is not officially open to the public, it is possible to wander quietly through its wings and floors. Inside, you will observe a thousand bureaucrats at work or asleep, their walls covered with posters, flyers, betel-nut stains and graffiti, with crude partitions scarring the majesty of once-expansive halls.

Farther along the Marina is Presidency College, in whose buildings Chisholm combined the Italianate with the Saracenic and the Hindu. Upkeep for this courtly red brick building, just a stone's throw from the beach, is beyond the university's meager finances. Stroll in here too, as no one will impede the passage of a well-intentioned visitor, and savor the buildings from an age when Madras was the intellectual capital of India. Loyola College, in the city's Nungambakkam district, is equally alluring. Teeming with earnest students, it is in better physical condition than most colonial buildings in Madras.

The British Raj was not without its spiritual side, and a visitor to Madras cannot afford to miss two colonial churches of contrasting style and state of repair. The first is St. Andrew's Kirk, now undergoing major restoration after decades of neglect.

Consecrated in 1821, the church was considered by many in the time of the Raj to be ''the noblest edifice in Hindustan.'' Visitors enter the neo-classical church through a massive pedimented Ionic portico, which is surmounted by a svelte tower with a tapering, octagonal spire. The spire, whose weathercock is 167 feet above ground level, is visible from afar in low-rise Madras.

Wander through the church, whose circular nave is topped by a dome that rests on 16 Ionic pillars, and marvel at its rare Scotch beauty, its rich woodwork and some of the finest stained glass in Asia. Bearing in mind that this was the church of colonizers erected in the midst of a sea of colonized people, the commemorative plaques acquire a powerful poignancy. Many men died young, and many perished of disease or in battle.

I was struck particularly by one plaque, accompanied by the marble figure of the dead officer, his left hand on hip, his swashbuckling mustache at full twirl: ''Erected by the officers of the Regiment and a few other military friends to the memory of Lieut. Col. James Walker, 3d Regiment Madras Light Infantry who was killed when leading a column of Madras troops to the storm of the Birmese intrenched lines near Rangoon on the 5th of December 1824.'' The inscription ended: ''One of India's best and bravest soldiers.''

St. Mary's Church, built in Fort St. George for the British garrison, is reputed to be the oldest Anglican church east of the Suez. There, near the altar, I came upon these words: ''Sacred to the memory of Major Godfrey Webster Whistler, commanding the 19th Regiment Madras Native Infantry, who died of cholera at Paulghautcherry, on the 14th of March 1843, in the 42d year of his age.'' Above the altar hangs a huge Raphaelite painting of ''The Last Supper,'' thought to have been brought as war booty from the nearby French colony of Pondicherry in 1761. The charming whitewashed church was built in 1678, as the spiritual focus for the burgeoning British population of Madras, and counted Governor Yale among its congregation. Yale was married here, and a yellowed register on display in a glass case at the back records the event. A muted neo-classical tower was added in 1701, and its steeple in 1795.

Mr. Muthiah writes glowingly of this dignified little church in his book ''Madras: The Gracious City'': ''Tombstones and memorials, registers and paintings, Bibles and silver plate -- material for a museum in the view of some, perhaps -- are all that survive in St. Mary's. But when a visitor walks through its portals, he walks with the ghost of Fort St. George, men and women who wrote 200 years of history all over the world.''

There is still much that is left of the fort, now occupied by the provincial government and its functionaries. Visit the five main gates, each with an entry of rounded masonry, and observe the sloping ramparts. Walk past the parade ground, surrounded by barracks for local regiments, and head for the Fort Museum, one of the most compelling places in Madras.

Originally the Public Exchange Hall, the museum now houses a collection of arms, coins, documents and portraits from the glory days of the city. One room displays the silver dishes and ewers bequeathed to St. Mary's Church in 1687 by the magnanimous Yale. Another has a collection of letters, mounted for easy reading, from the men of the Company to their overseers back home. A missive from Clive to the Select Committee, dated Feb. 6, 1757, reads in part: ''Gentlemen, I have got just time to acquaint you that yesterday morning we attacked the Nabob's Army consisting of 40,000 men and made a prodigious slaughter.''

From Fort St. George, go to George Town, or the Black Town, as it was known to the British. This is the township, abutting on the fortifications, where the Indians resided. It is still the hub of the city's commerce. Narrow, cramped lanes lead the walker from one wholesale area to another. Entire streets are given over to one type of goods: here you will find only leather sandals, there only stationery; in the street adjacent, only vegetables and fruit; in the street beyond that, plastic sheeting alone. The warren effect can be daunting to untutored wanderers, so go accompanied by a local guide. This will only enhance the pleasure of getting to the Indian heart of what is still, tenaciously, a very British city.

Old World rooms, pomegranate juice and friendly drivers

Where to Stay

The whitewashed Art Deco Connemara Hotel, 2 Binney Road, (91) 44-852-0123, is a haven of calm just off the bustling Anna Salai (formerly Mount Road), the city's main commercial artery. It is 11 miles, or 30 minutes, from the airport. If your budget permits it, stay in one of the spacious Old World rooms. Although the furniture is modern, the large bay windows, each with rattan or canvas blinds, evoke the expansive days of the Raj. A standard double is $155, or $165 facing the pool; Old World rooms are $235, suites $260, all plus 30 percent tax.

When to Go

The climate of Madras ranges from hot to hottest, so there is never a cool season in the American sense. Between late October and February is probably the best time. Proof of this is the fact that international cricket matches, played for a sapping five consecutive days, are always held in this period.

Where to Eat

The finest restaurant in Madras, Dakshin, in the Park Sheraton Hotel, 132 TTK Road, (91) (44) 499-4101, serves the cuisine of India's four southern states. The food is very spicy, and expensive by local standards. It is packed at dinner time, so reservations are advisable. A meal for two, with beer, is about $28 to $42.

Raintree, in the Connemara Hotel, 2 Binny Road, (91) 852-0123, is another southern Indian restaurant, open only for dinner. The tables are outdoors, with lanterns the only source of light. Classical musicians and dancers perform on a nearby stage, making for a heady, romantic experience. A meal for two, about $24. Reservations advised.

Annalakshmi, 804 Anna Salai, (91) 852-5109, is a vegetarian restaurant run by middle-class volunteers from a Hindu sect. Your waitress could be a doctor or an accountant, and she will almost certainly give you a brief religious discourse, delivered with a beaming smile. The delicious food costs about $14 a head. There is no alcohol, but you could try the pomegranate juice.

Buildings Worth a Visit

The Senate House, Chepauk Palace and Presidency College are all on Kamaraj Salai. (Salai is the Tamil word for street.)

The best way to get around in Madras is to hire a chauffeur-driven car from your hotel. For $24 to $28 a day, you can get an air-conditioned Indian car with a friendly driver who speaks a smattering of English. TUNKU VARADARAJAN

Photos: The Senate House of Madras University, which blends Byzantine, Moorish and Rajput Hindu styles. Fort St. George, now a government building. George Town, where Indians lived during the Raj. A street in George Town, still the hub of the city's commerce. Marble figure and plaque erected to Lieut. Col. James Walker at St. Andrew's Kirk. (Photographs by Rakesh Sahai/Black Star, for The New York Times)(pg. 11); Loyola College, in better condition than most colonial buildings. Marina Beach, Madras's favorite open-air playground. (Photographs by Rakesh Sahai/Black Star, for The New York Times)(pg. 12) Map of Madras showing local cities and points of interest.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN, who was born in New Delhi, is a freelance writer based in New York.

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